Blast Trauma - Brain Reading - Thinking Words - Shrinking Pupils

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Breedlove, S

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Jul 3, 2024, 6:38:35 AMJul 3

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/30/us/navy-seals-brain-damage-suicide.html

Pattern of Brain Damage Is Pervasive in Navy SEALs Who Died by Suicide

By Dave Philipps

David Metcalf’s last act in life was an attempt to send a message — that years as a Navy SEAL had left his brain so damaged that he could barely recognize himself.

He died by suicide in his garage in North Carolina in 2019, after nearly 20 years in the Navy. But just before he died, he arranged a stack of books about brain injury by his side, and taped a note to the door that read, in part, “Gaps in memory, failing recognition, mood swings, headaches, impulsiveness, fatigue, anxiety, and paranoia were not who I was, but have become who I am. Each is worsening.”

Then he shot himself in the heart, preserving his brain to be analyzed by a state-of-the-art Defense Department laboratory in Maryland.

The lab found an unusual pattern of damage seen only in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves.

The vast majority of blast exposure for Navy SEALs comes from firing their own weapons, not from enemy action. The damage pattern suggested that years of training intended to make SEALs exceptional was leaving some barely able to function.

But the message Lieutenant Metcalf sent never got through to the Navy. No one at the lab told the SEAL leadership what the analysis had found, and the leadership never asked.

It was not the first time, or the last. At least a dozen Navy SEALs have died by suicide in the last 10 years, either while in the military or shortly after leaving. A grass-roots effort by grieving families delivered eight of their brains to the lab, an investigation by The New York Times has found. And after careful analysis, researchers discovered blast damage in every single one.

It is a stunning pattern with important implications for how SEALs train and fight. But privacy guidelines at the lab and poor communication in the military bureaucracy kept the test results hidden. Five years after Lieutenant Metcalf’s death, Navy leaders still did not know.

Until The Times told the Navy of the lab’s findings about the SEALs who died by suicide, the Navy had not been informed, the service confirmed in a statement.

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https://nautil.us/big-brother-of-the-brain-is-here-694416/?_sp=2cf1f786-fbc5-4634-b698-48a6c0c04a09.1720001695639

Big Brother of the Brain Is Here

By Adolfo Plasencia

Recently, a group of Australian researchers demonstrated a “mind-reading” system called BrainGPT. The system can, according to its creators, convert thoughts (recorded with a non-invasive electrode helmet) into words that are displayed on a screen. Essentially, BrainGPT connects a multitasking EEG encoder to a large language model capable of decoding coherent and readable sentences from EEG signals.

Is the mind, the last frontier of privacy, still a safe place to think one’s thoughts? I spoke with Harvard-based behavioral neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a leader in the study of neuroplasticity and noninvasive brain stimulation, about what it means and how we can protect ourselves.

The reality is that the ability to read the brain and influence activity is already here. It’s no longer only in the realm of science fiction. Now, the question is, what exactly can we access and manipulate in the brain?

Consider this example: If I instruct you to move a hand, I can tell if you are preparing to move, say, your right hand. I can even administer a precise “nudge” to your brain and make you move your right hand faster. And you would then claim, and fully believe, that you moved it yourself. However, I know that, in fact, it was me who moved it for you. I can even force you to move your left hand—which you were not going to move—and lead you to rationalize why you changed your mind when in fact, our intervention led to that action you perceive as your choice. We have done this experiment in our laboratory.

In humans, we can modify brain activity by reading and writing in the brain, so to speak, though we can affect only very simple things right now. In animals, we can do much more complex things because we have much more precise control of the neurons and their timing. But the capacity for that modulation of smaller circuits progressively down to individual neurons in humans is going to come, including much more selective modification with optogenetic alternatives—that is, using light to control the activity of neurons.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/science/brain-language-thought.html

Do We Need Language to Think?

By Carl Zimmer

For thousands of years, philosophers have argued about the purpose of language. Plato believed it was essential for thinking. Thought “is a silent inner conversation of the soul with itself,” he wrote.

Many modern scholars have advanced similar views. Starting in the 1960s, Noam Chomsky, a linguist at M.I.T., argued that we use language for reasoning and other forms of thought. “If there is a severe deficit of language, there will be severe deficit of thought,” he wrote.

As an undergraduate, Evelina Fedorenko took Dr. Chomsky’s class and heard him describe his theory. “I really liked the idea,” she recalled. But she was puzzled by the lack of evidence. “A lot of things he was saying were just stated as if they were facts — the truth,” she said.

Dr. Fedorenko went on to become a cognitive neuroscientist at M.I.T., using brain scanning to investigate how the brain produces language. And after 15 years, her research has led her to a startling conclusion: We don’t need language to think.

“When you start evaluating it, you just don’t find support for this role of language in thinking,” she said.

When Dr. Fedorenko began this work in 2009, studies had found that the same brain regions required for language were also active when people reasoned or carried out arithmetic.

But Dr. Fedorenko and other researchers discovered that this overlap was a mirage. Part of the trouble with the early results was that the scanners were relatively crude. Scientists made the most of their fuzzy scans by combining the results from all their volunteers, creating an overall average of brain activity.

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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bizarre-video-eyeballs-age-pupils-size

A bizarre video of eyeballs confirms our pupils shrink with age

By Abdullahi Tsanni

Time takes its toll on the eyes.

Now a funky, Hitchcockian video of 64 eyeballs, all rolling and blinking in different directions, is providing a novel visual of one way in which eyes age.
A video display of 64 eyeballs, captured using eye trackers, helped researchers compare the size of younger and older study participants’ pupils under differing light conditions, confirming aging affects our eyes.

Lab studies have previously shown that the eye’s pupil size shrinks as people get older, making the pupil less responsive to light. A new study that rigged volunteers up with eye-trackers and GoPro videos and sent them traipsing around a university campus has confirmed what happens in the lab happens in real life, too.

While pupils remain sensitive to changing light conditions, pupil size can decrease up to about 0.4 millimeters per decade, researchers report June 19 in Royal Society Open Science. “We see a big age effect,” says Manuel Spitschan, a neuroscientist at Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tubingen, Germany.

The change helps explain why it can be increasingly harder for people to see in dim light as they age. Light travels through the dark pupil in the center of the eye to the retina, a layer of cells in the back of the eyes that converts the light into images. The pupil’s size can vary from 2 to 8 millimeters in diameter depending on light conditions, getting smaller in bright light and larger in dim light. “With a small pupil, less light enters the eye,” Spitschan says.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/02/fda-alzheimer-drug-approval

FDA approves second Alzheimer’s drug that can slow onset of disease

Richard Luscombe

Federal health authorities on Tuesday gave approval to an experimental new drug that has shown to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in trials.

Donanemab, manufactured by Eli Lilly, is the second medication that has won the blessing of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat patients showing early symptoms of the disease, most prominently cognitive impairment.

Last year, authorities cleared the drug lecanemab, marketed under the brand name Leqembi, after it demonstrated a similar decline in the progression of Alzheimer’s in a control group.

The treatments are not a cure, but the first to physically alter the course of the disease rather than just addressing its symptoms, the FDA said.
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Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly reported the success of its trial a year ago, and subsequently applied for the FDA authorization that was announced today. Experts at the time said it “could be the beginning of the end of Alzheimer’s disease”, which affects almost 7 million people, mostly older Americans, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

“Kisunla demonstrated very meaningful results for people with early symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease, who urgently need effective treatment options,” Anne White, executive vice-president of Eli Lilly said on Tuesday, referring to donanemab by the brand name it will be sold under.

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